The labyrinthine works of Ann Churchill: Jacqui McIntosh

The creative output of Ann Churchill (b. 1944) spans over fifty years. This incredible, ongoing body of work, encompassing drawing, painting, beading, knitting and more has, until recently, been largely unseen beyond family and friends. Through her inclusion in shows such as the Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist as Medium (2020–22) and her recent exhibition at Quench Gallery in Margate (2023), her extraordinary work is finally finding the audience it deserves. This newfound recognition comes at a time of increased interest in the work and lives of artists such as Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), Georgiana Houghton (1814–84), Madge Gill (1882–1961) and Ithell Colquhoun (1906–88) – artists whose output during their lifetime was either completely unknown or who sat at the fringes of an art historical canon not quite ready to embrace their esoteric and spiritual vision. Like Churchill, these were women who placed automatism at the centre of their practices and whose spiritual and artistic development was intertwined.

For Churchill, life and making have always been interconnected. Her early black and white ‘daily drawings’, drawn using the finest-tipped Rotring ink pens, were made in the short hours whilst her youngest child napped. As her children absorbed more and more of her time, she worked on larger ink pieces that she could stop and start when she had moments to herself. Full of vibrant colour, these intensely worked pieces (made from the mid-1970s onwards) are endlessly fascinating to view, filled with passage after passage of intricate, labyrinthine and abstracted patterns. Like the virtuosic whiplash line created by Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98), Churchill’s drawing weaves and coils, following an energetic flow which takes the eye from form to form. These incredible works on paper were made without planning or preparatory drawing, emerging instead from the subtle interplay between the hand and the unconscious mind

Just over ten years ago, Churchill embarked on a new way of making and taught herself to paint with watercolour. These enormous works on paper (the largest of which is almost 4 metres wide) differ from her earlier abstract pieces. They display immense, invented landscapes with skies that merge into land and rivers, building layer upon layer of worldly realms, connected by energetic forces.

Constructed from scores of smaller paintings and stitched together using linen thread, Churchill works without a plan, making automatically and following where her intuition takes her. Later, when her works are laid out and pieced together, she finds an energetic rhythm that connects them – an instinctive, synchronistic process that she’s described as akin to ‘creating order from chaos’3

During the first national lockdown in 2020, circles began to appear more frequently within Churchill’s work. In one large-scale piece, circles, filled with abstract forms and patterns, cluster around seven standing stones or ‘rock goddesses’.4 For Churchill, these circles represent the departing souls of those lost during the pandemic. Their outlined forms appear at times to merge into the background, her work suggesting that their life force is not lost but is instead transformed and returned to nature.

Churchill’s focus on the feminine within the natural landscape links her to a lineage of women artists such as radical feminists Monica Sjöö (1938–2005) and Judy Chicago (b. 1939). Her works also resonate strongly with those of the British artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun (1906–88), whose drawings and paintings often explored her animistic belief in an Earth that is alive - where all living things, including humans, are connected by a vital, energetic spirit and force. Churchill’s goal has always been to visualise the energy and unseen forces that exist between the mind, the body, and the world around us. As viewers, we are invited into her incredible invented worlds, to experience our own place within them.

Jacqui McIntosh, 2023

This is an abridged version of an essay written to accompany the exhibition GRATITUDENOUSLY: Ann Churchill & J.M. Churchill at Quench Gallery, 28 January – 5 March 2023

Click here to download and read the essay in full Link to Ann’s website - https://annchurchill.art